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Amanda Auerbach’s poem “Rights” appears in our Summer issue. Here, she remembers the two voices—one from the left and one from the right—that inspired it.

Photo by Jerry Kiesewetter.

I wrote the poem “Rights” in early February, on a drive up to Winter Park in Colorado, where I was going for my first ski day of the season. Back home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’m a graduate student, it was the first day of Jorie Graham’s spring-semester poetry workshop. Even though I was missing the first day of workshop for skiing, I decided I would still make this my first day of poetry. I hadn’t been able to write since the election; there had been so many sources of anger to sort through that I was left feeling empty. I wasn’t sufficiently energized to create or do much else beyond working on my dissertation.

Attending the Boston Women’s March in January had helped pull me out of that state. I was struck by all of the politically relevant expressions of joy I encountered there. My favorite was probably the pervasive pink pussy hat, which casually baited the religious right. Though I came to the march sans poster and sans pussy hat, feeling like I didn’t have anything to add, I discovered, from participating in the chants, that I did. I had a voice I could use to say the same things as everyone else.

I wanted to try saying something in that protesting voice to see how it sounded. As my father-in-law drove me and my husband up Highway 40, the first two lines of “Rights” came into my head: “I do not do well without my chattel. / I do not do well without doing what I will with my chattel.” I assumed, after writing these lines, that my speaker was a stock Trump supporter. Then the language of the Women’s March protestors started to make its way into the poem as well. “It will bite your fingers,” the poem says. This came from the posters that said, THIS PUSSY BITES BACK. The place where these two lines meet is righteous indignation. What would happen, I thought, if I blended the language of the left and the right into a single voice? Read More

Christine Lincoln’s story in our Winter issue, “What’s Necessary to Remember When Telling a Story,” comprises no more than fifteen hundred words, but its length belies its breadth. Braiding enchantment with sorrow and hope, it begins inside a dream, with a man carrying a small woman in his mouth—“a grown woman not much bigger than a bullet”—running from a dark-skinned girl thought to be coming after them. From there, it unfurls into an agonizing, tender portrait of the nameless dreamer, once an abusive partner, who spends the rest of the story musing over the love he ruined years ago. Lincoln, born in the sixties, hails from Baltimore; having endured a period of addiction that briefly left her suicidal, she turned to fiction, which was, she told me, what she needed to save herself. She went on to pursue an M.F.A. and currently lives in York, Pennsylvania, where she is poet laureate emeritus.

I spoke with Lincoln over the phone, her voice gentle and heartening, about “What’s Necessary”; about her debut collection of short stories, Sap Rising; and about her thoughts on race and literature in America, both today and as it was for her growing up one of the only black children in her school. Every so often, she’d pause midsentence—near tears, she’d say, because she hadn’t shared this with anyone before.

Amparo Dávila was born in 1928—a fated year in Mexican letters, it also heralded the arrival of Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Ibarguëngoitia, Inés Arredondo, Enriqueta Ochoa, and Carlos Valdés—in the poetically named town of Pinos, in the state of Zacatecas. In interviews, Dávila has stressed the importance of her childhood in her formation as a writer, particularly the loss of her younger brother, who died in infancy. Her earliest memories are of her father’s library; she harbors a special fondness for his leather-bound copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustave Doré, which she read and reread even though its images of the infernal circles of hell and fearsome demons terrified her. She also recalls watching dead bodies driven in carts past her house; the surrounding towns had no cemeteries, and the dead had to be transported to her town for burial. The sight of the corpses, sometimes barely covered by sheets, left an indelible impression in her mind and, in turn, her fiction, which visits frequently with the specter of death.

For someone like me, who grew up delighting in the ghost stories of Edith Wharton and the gothic illustrations of Edward Gorey, translating Dávila offers a delicious challenge. Entering the world of one of her stories is like walking back in time to the dark and lonely world of Pinos, a semideserted mining town “filled with wind and shadows,” as she described it to Elena Poniatowska in a 1957 interview; it is to witness the corpse-laden carts rattling by and to feel the yawning absence of a lost brother. It is also to experience a golden day in a garden in Guanajuato, when, as a young woman, Dávila quoted a passage from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince to the exalted Mexican novelist Alfonso Reyes; enchanted, he invited her to visit him in the capital, where she became his assistant. Dávila still resides in Mexico City. She writes in a library whose shelves brim with books by her favorite authors, among them Kafka, Hesse, Paz, and Rulfo, as well as by those with whom she most identifies: Borges, Bioy Casares, Quiroga, and Cortázar (with whom she kept up a literary correspondence and friendship for many years). Read More

“Channel,” as part of the “habitus” exhibition. Photos by Jessica Naples Grilli.

I grew up along the Susquehanna, and taught for many summers along the Tiber, and today most warm early mornings you’ll find me rowing my shell on the Schuylkill. I learned to row in middle age because I wanted to see my city, Philadelphia, from the perspective of the river and to know what it would be like to be buoyed by its surface. Was this how I prepared? Or was it water plants and buried objects, Whitman and Wang Wei, Charles Cros and Works and Days, rhymes and chants, imagining how we pass in parallel at disparate speeds?

“Channel” began and begins with the words “salt” and “sweet.” I had been churning them in my thoughts for months—streams and the sea, the tears in our eyes, and the moisture in our words. A desire, after a hard winter, to write a long poem about a river. “Channel”: from canna, canalis, a pipe, a groove, a reed, a bed of running water. As I sketched and made notes, I wondered what views the poem could open, and how much history, where it would emerge (somewhere in a spring and in Spring) and where it would end (eventually at Siracusa, site of the sweet/salt legend of Arethusa and dear to my heart). In other words, it started with some words, as most poems start. Read More

“Bad Behavior,” a short story by Alexia Arthurs in our new Summer issue, follows Stacy, the teenage daughter of Jamaican immigrants living in Brooklyn. After a series of troubling events at home and school, she’s sent to live with her grandmother in Jamaica.

Arthurs, a graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was born in Jamaica and moved to New York with her family at the age of twelve. She wrote to me about her story by e-mail.

INTERVIEWER

Where did “Bad Behavior” come from?

ARTHURS

I wondered what an immigrant mother sacrifices when she raises her children in America—so many of her energies are directed toward survival and providing. I babysat to pay for my undergraduate education in New York City, and I noticed that women who were more financially settled—who could afford expensive childcare and someone to clean for them—were particularly concerned with the anxieties of their children. It’s interesting to consider which mothers have that privilege, to be present in a vigorous way. “Bad Behavior” deals with this—“Not all mothers could afford to be kind.” Also, once I knew of a young girl who was dangerously reckless, and I remember that someone suggested sending her to Jamaica as a last resort. I don’t know what became of the girl. Read More